What is Kosher?

Have you ever wondered what kosher is? You hear this a lot, or maybe you see this on a piece of food that you pick up at the grocery store that has a kosher label on it. There’s essentially two types of kosher. There’s biblical kosher, and there’s rabbinic kosher or halachic kosher as you would say in the Jewish world. Rabbinic kosher, or halachic kosher, is a way that the food is prepared. There’s very high standards for this. It even sometimes comes down to which knife you cut something with can’t be used in cutting a different kind of food. Biblical kosher is a little bit more straightforward, and it goes back to what was written in the Torah where God forbade the Jewish people from consuming certain kinds of food. Typically, this was shellfish: shrimp, lobster, etc; and pig: bacon, ham, whatnot.

So in the modern world today, typically you’ll find in the Messianic Jewish community, most people live what they would consider a biblically kosher life, which means that they eat cheeseburgers and they love cheeseburgers, but they don’t eat bacon cheeseburgers. Whereas someone that would adhere to more of a rabbinic kosher would definitely not eat a cheeseburger. They wouldn’t mix meat and cheese, and they definitely would not eat bacon. So these are basically the two types of kosher that exist today.